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Wednesday, 20 January 2010

The Soundtrack Of My Life

Music has played a hugely important part in my life. From a very early age my parents would encourage me to listen to the radio or to their records - just as they encouraged me to read. As I got older, I used to sing along to the radio while my older brother and sisters were getting ready to go to school in the morning and tape songs from the radio to make my own 'collections'. I remember buying my very first single, on vinyl, of course.

Music became an every day part of life as I struggled to learn the piano, the saxaphone and quite a few percussion instruments as part of my high school orchestra and how, as life began to change, music helped me to make the difficult transition from teenager to adult. At university my most important possessions were my shelves full of albums and I would happily spend a week eating toast if it meant I could afford to go dancing in the evenings.

Older still and I realise that music has been a constant in my life. It has understood me when I felt misunderstood; lifted my spirits when I have felt low and said the words that I have sometimes felt difficult to articulate. It has never let me down.

So, when I found out that this month's second challenge at All About Me was to be The Soundtrack Of My Life, I knew that I couldn't possibly create a layout that included all of the songs that mean something to me - there isn't enough space or time - but I did know that not having a working camera wouldn't stop me. I had to do this challenge!

And this leads me to a rather convoluted explanation of how I designed my layout. Not having any digital scrapbook materials, I chose to create the main image using Polyvore. That's right folks. Not only can you use Polyvore to create fashionable collages, but also the most amazing illustrations. It's actually very simple to find items, arrange them in layers and create. Admittedly, to save the image, you need to e-mail it to yourself, then save the image as a useable file. But that's not really a big deal, right? Still much easier than fiddling with lots of layers in Photoshop.

Once I had the main image, I transferred it to Photoshop Elements and placed an electronic version of a Basic Grey scrapbooking paper behind it as a background. I then made some adjustments to the colours and added my text. Et voila.

Do let me know what you think before heading over to All About Me to see what the rest of the Design Team came up with. If you have any questions about Polyvore, etc, feel free to ask in the comments, okay?

i love this LO clair, it obviously means alot to you too. i have yet to consider how to demonstrate my love for music and having done 1 LO recently for a musical bloghop it will have to be very different. i have a similar problem in that so much music has been influential. maybe i'll have to redo my top 10Jo xxx

Oh, fab - very cleverly done :-) This is such a coincidence! I made a layout at the weekend which is essentially about the soundtrack to my life right now - it's the song that I'm constantly hearing in my head, that just seems to FIT - before I even knew the AAM topic :-)

I think it is beautiful hun, I like the simplicity of it, and the quote is absolutely perfect. It makes me think of my "difficult" periods where I'd just lay there listening to the same few tunes, because they said what I wanted to say. It's just lovely xx

It is indeed beautiful and very pop art-ish (I made that one up). I think this would make a great poster. Blow it up and hang it in the entertainment room! I wish I had an entertainment room, then I would definitely have you do a really big one for me :) One day perhaps!

You said it all beautifully. And the quote - how perfect. The one I am always quoting is, "I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible." That about sums up my high school days. My friend and I went to London for 3 weeks the summer before our last year of high school and she was a HUGE Morrissey fan. We went to all these markets buying bootleg tapes of live concerts. My fave in H.S. was Sinead. I still think about what it felt like to hear her voice for the first time. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!